With social development and progress and falling hardware costs, surveillance cameras are increasingly and widely used by families as a front-end device for surveillance. When used, the surveillance camera is installed at a specific location, from where fixed-location surveillance can be carried out. The surveillance range of a regular camera is limited due to its limited field of view, which is inherent to the camera. A regular one-piece camera has a maximum view angle of approximately 60°; thus, it covers a very small area of surveillance. When the camera is designated to monitor a certain area, it may not be able to cover other areas, i.e. blind areas. With respect to the difficult problem of safety blind spots in video surveillance, the weaknesses of traditional cameras are understood, and it is hoped that 360° panoramic video information can be obtained. Among solutions that address this problem, the simplest is to install more cameras at the venue that is under surveillance, but obviously this increases the cost of surveillance tremendously. Wide-angle or even ultra-wide-angle fisheye cameras may also be employed; this type of camera features a large field of view and can monitor a larger area of the scene. However, with the increase in the area under surveillance, the clarity of details in the recorded images is not guaranteed, and small things may not be viewed clearly. Moreover, fisheye cameras have very large image distortion, distorting and deforming the images.
In order to address the trade-off between the field of view and clarity, two solutions have been created, i.e. the multi-lens stitching solution and the pan/tilt camera with wide-angle lens solution. Here, the multi-camera stitching solution comprises: a plurality of fixed cameras is used, with each camera pointing in a different direction, and images recorded by the plurality of cameras are stitched into a complete panoramic image based on the geometric relationship between their shooting directions and the computation of boundary connections between the images. The resulting images from the stitching demonstrate higher clarity compared to images taken by fisheye lenses. The pan/tilt camera with wide-angle camera head solution has been adopted for application by a large number of manufacturers due to the advantages it provides, including the relatively low cost of device hardware, the ease of control, etc.
However, with currently available technology, panoramic stitching algorithms for the multi-camera solution and the pan/tilt camera solution are highly complex and require a large amount of computation.
The disclosed methods and systems address one or more of the problems listed above.